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Please enjoy the forum, and if it has helped you in any way, we hope that a small donation can be made to support our FULLY member supported forum. You will never see advertisements here, and that is because of the generous members who have made our forum possible. We are in our second decade as a beekeeping forum and all thanks to member support. At the top right of every page is a donations link. Please help if you can.

The first one I locked the exposure and the focus on the white hive and then rotated the camera to where the bees were and used the onboard flash to lighten the bees and darken the background. Unfortunately there is no manual focus in macro mode on this camera and you have to use auto focus when you're in macro mode so the focus was just a guess, but it worked out pretty well.

A-ha! Well, that certainly was not a thing I'd ever seen before -- at least, not on bees!

-- Kris

The actual bridge between the drone and the queen is his extended male organ apparatus (endophallus) shown in the second photo, which is tightly plugged into the sting chamber of the receptive female. His explosive ejaculation ruptures his male organ apparatus and propels semen into the queen's oviduct. In addition to the forceful ejaculation of semen, the terminal bulb at the tip of the endophallus remains in the queenâ€™s female organ until the next drone finds and mates with her. The last plug is thought to be brought back to the hive as a sign of the breeding